


This Time

by DuskDragon39



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Alternate Universe - Transcendence (Gravity Falls), Gen, Please ignore my blatant disrespect of canon, headcannons, it is entirely intentional, up to my eyeballs in headcannons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-16
Updated: 2018-04-16
Packaged: 2019-04-23 13:04:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14333049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DuskDragon39/pseuds/DuskDragon39
Summary: It begins, as most tales do, with a whisper:Someone, please help.Anyone. Please.This time, someone answers.Someone with horns of wood and bone, crowned with fire and born from the soul of an honest man.





	This Time

It begins, as most tales do, with a whisper:

_Someone, please help._

_Anyone. Please._

 

This time, someone answers.

 

He is crowned with fire and with horns of hands, grown straight and tall from the soul of an honest man.

He is the wielder of an axe once held by a lumberjack, a ghost, a man, a demon.

He was born from demonic fire and the warmth of a family, from the cold hard rage of - you took what is _mine_ , how dare you touch what is _mine_ -

He cradles the child in his arms and takes them home. Their parents will find them there in the morning, curled up on their doorstep and covered in leaves.

“The tree-man found me!” they’ll say when their parents ask, and for years afterwards parents in the Falls will let their children roam the forest without heed for the hour or day, safe in the knowledge that the children will always come back.

The legend starts here, with a child, a decision made in the memory of the soul of a good man.

It will not end here.

 

The tales spread.

“Father Tree,” they call him. They say that he was born from a deal with a demon, that his antlers stretch past the clouds and are hung with human hands, that the fire that burns on hs crown was started by a demon.

Parents warn their children of the forest with him. “Stay inside,” they say. “Watch for the man in the forest, because he’ll add your hands to his collection if he finds you.”

“He’ll kill you if you kill a tree,” some say, and the newly formed Dryads decide that this is an excellent myth to propagate- might even stop the deaths of some of their sisters, maybe. Hopefully.

Some of the Dryads regard him as their father, the great tree. Some say that there’s a soul out there, crowned in antlers, bones, and hands, one that was the father of even the father. Some scoff at this- how could Father Tree be born from something that looked like that?

 

His legend spreads beyond even that however.

 

“He’ll keep you safe, ya know,” says one child. “If you’re a child. He won’t harm children.” The others nod at this sage advice.

“I heard,” adds another, “That if you find him you’ll be safe from the…. everything.”

 

‘He’ll help you if you’re lost”

“He’ll show you the way home.”

“He’ll keep you safe in the dark.”

“His antlers are hung with the hands of those that tried to hurt you.”

“He carries an axe that’ll chop of the head of anyone that tries to hurt you.”

“He’ll come if you climb to the top of the highest tree in the forest and call his name.”

“He’ll come if you need a home, a place to stay, if you’re lost and you’ve nowhere to run.”

Unlike most legends, this one is mostly true.

 

 _Father Tree, Father Tree, please protect me, I want to go home_.

 

He takes them to the Shack, mostly, the ones he finds who hide amongst his roots and huddle beneath his branches. “Father Tree,” they call him, and he’s never quite sure why.  
But for the memory of a man with an axe in his hands and fire in his heart, he takes them in.

He’s grown now, is taller than the tallest tree and holds more memories than a being should. He isn’t human, can’t think as a human does, but some part of him remains aware of a man who had fire in his heart and children in his hands.

The rest of his experience is…

Well, trees. Sometimes the small saplings find him again, after they’re no longer quite so small. Sometimes they bring others with them, not-saplings who smell like fire and smoke and steel. He doesn’t like the not-saplings, but he finds he rarely has to deal with them for long. Their lives pass more quickly now, quicker than when he was freshly born from wood, fire, and the remains of a life cut off too soon. He finds that he moves slower now, too, that his thoughts to him are as quick as ever but to the saplings slower than the passing of the snow-wet-dry.

After a human millenia, he finds that he’s expanded. His branches now touch each forest, each life is now entwined to his, and he’s surprised, because his life started in fire, death, and pain.  
The forest of hands he pulls with him has grown too, and stretches for meters around his main trunk.

The bright-blue-yellow-flame that woke him never visits with the sapling, though sometimes he’ll  
catch a glimpse of the yellow-blue-sparks that signal his waker’s presence. He finds that he’s vaguely disappointed at this for some reason.

The children still come, and he still takes them in, to a place where the children have always been safe. The Shack he leaves them at eventually rises and totters off, and for a while he’s unsure as to where it’s gone. It comes back eventually, though, and settles at the base of his roots. The young-bright-sapling he saved so long ago still finds her way there occasionally, and will stay there for the brief flicker that is a human life. He notes it at first only for the flicker of interest the Shack expresses at her presence, and later for the care that she gives to his saplings that call for his help. Once or twice, the antler-not-sapling-maker is there, and both he and the Shack are happy.

Outside the forest, the world continues to spin.

 

The legend continues to grow.

“Call his name three times in a forest under a blue moon and he’ll find you.”  
“If you climb to the top of the highest tree around and look around you’ll see his branches.”

“Sacrifice a child and bury them in the forest and you’ll never be able to use your hands again- he’ll take them.”

“Who?”

“The father. Father Tree.”

 

They say he was born from a deal that went wrong, that Alcor created him from a man’s soul when he was bored. They say that he kills indiscriminately now, locked in tortured agony by the the Dreambender.  
They say that Sarva was connected to him somehow, that they were the soul taken by the Dreambender.

Twin Soulers at one point decide that obviously an immortal tree-man and a demon had to have sex at one point, right? Right? Obviously.  
Al-V decides that he’s not going to even touch that one.  
After infecting their computers with variations of his source code, of course. They’re not getting off that easily.

Scholars mutter between themselves about a being called the Woodsman that showed up early in Alcorian lore, only to disappear some 100 years after the Transcendence. The most curious among them ask why no one’s thought to check the legends of Father Tree.  
The more prudent just mutter about curses and bury themselves in a mountain of books.  
Eventually, the study is forbidden on the grounds of a 75% mortality rate.

The descendants of the Pleiades pass down their own story:  
Of a being that stood guard outside their home, that now wanders through the forests of the world, dragging with him a canopy of hands, a flaming crown, and an axe whose edge never dulls. He’s gentle with us, they say. He’s kind. He’s dangerous.

 

One day, the Dreambender is summoned by a small child. He’s surprised, of course. The child is no more than six, and obviously not expecting a demon. The circle they’d touched with a bloody hand was carved into the ground and soaked in the remains of old blood. Dipper thinks briefly of the summons that he’d had to ignore on the account of the most recent Mizar, and wonders.

Briefly.

After a minute, he’s fairly certain that it’s sheep’s blood, and that the child really did summon him by accident. Somehow.

Still weird.

Then he looks closer at the child. They’re slight, too small for their age **[10, just turned ten and a half last Tuesday ]**. Their ribs jut from underneath their ill fitting clothing. Legs longer than a horse’s protrude from tattered leggings, and their head is crowned with a mop of unruly black hair.

Above that hair rise antlers that now hang heavy with peach fruit.

Dipper stares at them for a moment, then plops himself down into the circle with a sigh. The child is still staring at him. It’s getting kinda creepy.

And that’s coming from the literal demon in the room.

“You’re not a tree.”

Dipper’s silence greets that rather baffling statement.

“Why aren’t you a tree?” the child asks.

He pokes at hs hat, pulls out an assortment of semi-conscious candy wrappers, and then says: “Nope.”

“Okay, but why?” Their voice takes on a plantitive note. “Tommy said that you’d be a tree. He said so.” They… actually stomp their foot. Okay then.

“....Because ‘m a demon?”

“But-”

“Look, what do you want kid?”

The kid looks kind of… sheepish? Actually, strike that, they look exactly like Erschie had when they'd first joined the Flock and declared their full name.

So. Sheepish. And proud. At the same time.

Dipper decides not to question it further, and crosses his arms. Beneath him, the kid pokes at their sketchy summoning circle.

“Tommy first said that I wouldn't be able to do right? And then I-”

Dipper tunes the rest of their long winded explanation, and decides that it really wasn't any of his business.

After all, there was literally no demon in existence that focused on trees. Seriously. What the hell.

And then he thinks about the kid, about their too thin frame, and the day old bruises **[given by their father, after he drank too much] [delt out by their mother after their father was finished with her [freak, she calls them [freak, the other kids whisper, and it hurts-]]]** , and about the antlers now heavy with peach fruit that rise proudly above their head **[Mabel’s anger over the cigarette burns on Henry’s shoulder [his brother’s nightmares]]**.

From above them, the basement door opens.

“Tanin!” a voice bellows, and the kid in front of him looks genuinely terrified for a minute before hiding the fear somewhere under a cocky mask. That's all it takes to make up Dipper’s mind for him, and he offers the kid a hand.

“Tell you what, kid,” he says. “I'll get you somewhere safe, and you let me have those peaches on your antlers.” It's an open-ended deal, full of interesting loopholes the demonic side in Dipper would just love to exploit, but the kid just stands there, startled.

Footsteps start coming down the stairs.  
Tanin shakes his hand.

“Deal,” they say, and before they're done speaking the basement is empty, and Tanin’s father stands above an empty summoning circle.

Two months later, Dipper will hear stories of Father Tree, and will realize just exactly what the kid had been looking for.

Three months later, he will realize that the being in front of him was the Woodsman. Except much older, and much larger, with a forest of skeletal hands that hang from his impossibly large antlers.

Dipper’s never quite sure how the Woodsman became a guardian of children, but he supposes that some legends never make sense.

 

Unlike most legends, this one is true.

 

The millenia pass without fail, time proceeding in silent step along an irreversible timeline. The Woodsman is a god at this point. He is a being none could dare to oppose, older than most beings on the physical plane of the world. His antlers hold up a forest, now. A single step takes him a hour to complete.

He doesn’t much like moving anymore.

Still, he finds himself protecting the saplings. They come to him in panic, in fear, and in death.  
He protects them in the Man's name. He takes the hands, the feet, the limbs of their abusers, their pursuers, the ones that would sacrifice them.

The smell of rot never quite fades from the upper reaches of his antlers.

The legend dies down for a time around the 12th millenia.

About the same time, the blue-fire-maker shows up, distraught and leaking water. His aura is roiling dark-grey, laden with the sensation of an everlasting winter, death without an end. He comes seeking the shack, a being which has long since moved on.

The maker huddles for a time at his roots, and then disappears into the dream-color-realm, surrounded by the fluffy-dark-bright ones that make up his grove.

A few centuries later, he appears again briefly, laden with the scent of rot and day old sapling blood.

If the Woodsman could have done anything, he would've, but even he could not cut off the hands of the maker. Still, his anger rolls throughout the forest, and the maker collapses into a ball at his roots, shaking and crying.  
After he leaves, he does not return.

 

Years later, the saplings have fled the soft-life-home. They’re gone, every one of them. The Shack, long since abandoned, totters off to it's old home in the center.  
The Woodsman is alone. Forgotten.

[He dies with the sun, with the rest of terrestrial life. He dies content enough, feeling as though he did the Man's memory well.  
Dipper would disappear into the mindscape for years after his omniscience informed him of that fact.]

The people no longer remember Father Tree, the demon's son, the taker of hands. They study their textbooks, their history notes. They talk about the Transcendence, about the great demon Alcor, the instigator of the whole mess. Scholars discuss technical and practical applications of pre-Transcendence technology.

Students wonder just how they survived without magi tech and the ability to travel between stars in the course of several hours

 

Eventually, the Earth itself is destroyed in the expanding radius of it's star, and disappears forever into story and song.

A few of its legends remain. There's Mizar, of course, because they’re still around. The Dreambender, obviously, is still present and more than willing to make it so that he's not forgotten. Outside of them…. They speak of St. Nick, of presents left in shoes and under trees.

They speak of angels and demons and gods and shapeshifters.

Some ask if it counts as a legend if the story is true.

Some hord ancient books of fairy tales as if they’re worth their weight in gold. They are, usually. Books went out of style millenia ago, after all- seriously, why do you still even have those old musty things?

Father Tree, however, dies with the rest of them- the cryptids and the gods and the urban legends. The Earth is uninhabitable now, after all, and few people have the time to visit a places that is now mostly molten stone and burning rock. Even when a device is invented that allows others to see the imprints of magic long gone, they do not visit. There is nothing there for them. Even the discovery that the Dreambender regularly visits the remains of a grave in what used to be the northern hemisphere of the planet does nothing to invite travel to that particular far corner of the galaxy.

 

And then another war happens, and this time, this time, the threat of mutually assured destruction doesn't hold, and suddenly history and English professors are seen as really, really unnecessary.

 

Time passes.

 

A single world is left, cradled in the wings of a god that is their sun and their stars.

 

That too, fades eventually.

 

The legend dies, as most legends do, with silence.  
_Someone, please help,_ they call _._  
_Anyone, please._

This time, there’s no one left to come.

**Author's Note:**

> [inspired by the Brother Frost stories from the LoG fandom]
> 
> i apologize.  
> i have no justification for this thing.  
> have a headcannon dump.


End file.
